Five Reasons We’re Not Going to Buy the Amanda Knox Book Tomorrow

When it gets right down to it, Amanda Knox’s meditative memoir Waiting To Be Heard may remind one of the way Gertrude Stein famously described Oakland: “There’s no there there.”

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She basically emerges, after 463 pages, as nothing more than a young, impetuous innocent abroad who, as New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani accurately nails it, “suddenly found her caught up in a Hitchcockian nightmare, with bad luck and some bad judgment calls leading her into a labyrinth seemingly without end.”

Be forewarned, if you are looking to be titillated by salacious and jaw-dropping revelations (before plunking down $28.99) you may want to consider that this is pretty much as good as it gets, based on a review of critics who go an early look at the book:

-- She says she endured relentless sexual harassment at the hands of a vile senior prison guard and fellow female inmates while in prison, her upcoming bombshell tell-all book reveals. “He was fixated on the topic of sex — who I’d done it with, how I liked it . . . and if I would do it with him.”

-- She says that she and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were smoking marijuana (she smokes a lot of dope), reading a Harry Potter book aloud in German and watching the film Amélie at his apartment when her British roommate was killed.

-- Driven to despair, she contemplates suicide in prison, including poisoning herself with bleach, swallowing shards of glass or a broken pen, hanging herself, banging her heads against a wall, or as she says she imagined at one point, suffocating herself with a garbage bag.

-- She concedes she did act rather bizarrely after her housemate’s murder and that when she went with police to the crime scene she put on protective booties and gloves and sang out, “Ta-Dah” and thrust out her arms “like the lead in a musical.” It was, she writes, “to ease the tension for myself, because this was surreal and terrifying.”

-- She says she was told by a doctor that she’d tested positive for H.I.V., but this turned out to be false.